Swordwhale Walking: Illustration, stories, photojourneys, videos

Elves, orcs and bunyips. I illustrated a few role-playing game modules, mostly for Bill Fawcett of Mayfair Games.

Weird find #2: my old Dragon Magazine cover is now wallpaper, available on this website. The model for the winged horse is Bazraf, the grey horse in these photos (he's a flea-bitten grey with a blue left eye, and a swash of pink skin on the right nostril). You'll recognize the redheaded Elf as the kid doing an illusion of a horse on the fire segment of the medicine wheel (front page). The horse's markings are backwards on the Dragon cover: Dragon printed the piece backwards, to fit in the title etc.

While I confined my own forays into writing fanfiction to Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth (with one appearance by my favorite X-Man: Nightcrawler), I learned to draw people by practicing on Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. Han was easier: a more quirky face (I actually liked Luke best, but his more typical Golden Hero face was actually harder to capture). Here: a link to an old fanzine called Falcon's Flight.

A friend, who is the ultimate Geek Goddess when it comes to the indecipherable magic that is computers, asked for a logo. "Kitsune" is Japanese for fox (a magical figure in Japanese myth)...click my swordwhale logo to go to Kitsune's page and see how a simple black and white drawing was turned into magic!

Early on, in 1977, fans observed that both the newly released Star Wars, and the well-known Lord of the Rings (1955) were the same tale with different settings... sort of. they both follow the classic Hero Journey/quest format (read Joseph Campbell, Lucas did). One enterprising fan did a hilarious send-up of our two favorite Hero Journeys, colliding characters as they went: I illustrated it thusly...

Quest for the Unicorn's Horn, and Quest for the Dragon's Eye were done for Bill Fawcett of Mayfair Games as part of the "Swordquest" series. They were "choose your own adventure" type books, where you would, at the end of each chapter, make a choice; leading you to one of several possible chapters, and many possible endings to the book; a role-playing game in a book. They were usually written in second person ("you open the door, you see..."). Once more, Bazraf became the model for a fantastic equine (the unicorn).

Poetry by one of my favorite fantasy authors. I got to illustrate all of it. Cool!

In school, I read fast, took notes fast, and scrambled to have time to doodle. Usually horses, often with wings. I understood the structure of horses far better than the structure of wings.